Redding >> What do you do when there is too much dog doo? One Redding apartment complex is going high tech to find the answer.

Faced with numerous owners not picking up after their dogs when they poop on the grounds, the management at the Shasta View Apartments plans to start collecting the physical evidence to track down offending pets and their owners.

Apartment manager Yvonne Martin said when they find unaccounted-for feces they will have it bagged up and shipped off for DNA testing. At the least, the testing would identify the dog breed.

Martin said she knows the breed of all the dogs who live at the 51-unit complex — close enough to match the breed with the owner.

Martin said she feels bad when tenants want to try to use the picnic area on the grounds but are dismayed to find numerous canine land mines.

“It’s ruining the grass. You go out there in the picnic area and there’s a bunch of dog feces on the grass,” Martin said. She estimated 80 percent of the tenants have dogs.

“We have a beautiful place for people to enjoy, and on a hot day the feces — you can smell it,” she said. “I want my tenants to enjoy the grassy area without having feces everywhere.”

There are companies that use DNA to match an individual dog to its unique pile of poop. And some apartment managers are taking advantage of the technology.

“That’s what a lot of the property owners are starting to do in a lot of the major cities,” Martin said.

Tommy Gallagher, assistant manager at a complex in Tempe, Arizona, said he previously worked at a property that collected the DNA of every dog when their owners moved into the apartments.

If an owner didn’t clean up a dog’s mess, they would send it off to a lab to match up the DNA with the dog, he said.

Usually, a phone call or an email reminding the tenant of the problem was enough to head off repeat offenses, he said.

“There never was any push back. People were pretty cool,” Gallagher said. The apartment complex also threatened a $25 fine for repeat offenders.